When Bailing Out Moronic Banks Costs More Than Your Defense Budget

"Two more Italian banks failed over the weekend– Banco Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca. (In other news, the sky is blue.) The Italian Prime Minister himself stated that depositors’ funds were at risk, so the government stepped in with a bailout and guarantee package that could cost taxpayers as much as 17 billion euros. That’s a lot of money in Italy– around 1% of GDP. In fact it’s basically as much as the 17.1 billion euros they spent on national defense last year (according to an estimate by Italian think tank IAI). You don’t have to have a PhD in economics to figure out that NO government can afford to spend its entire defense budget every time a couple of medium-sized banks need a bailout."